In typical commercial buildings, facility managers often do not have thorough knowledge on the comfort preferences of individual occupants. Therefore, it is hard to ensure comfort and energy saving at the same time. Since one facility manager may serve hundreds to thousands of occupants, ad hoc communications, such as face-to-face talk, email or telephone, are not effective, especially when occupants' preference may be conflictive, or not feasible due to hardware limitations.
Under one circumstance, facility managers who implement aggressive energy policies often achieve energy savings with some or significant sacrifice in occupant comfort. Under some of other circumstances, facility managers often must relax their energy policies to avoid occupant complaints, reducing the opportunity for energy savings. While the worst circumstances are also most common, where facility managers often over-react to occupant complaints by setting cooling set points too low or raising heating set points too high, which brings both energy waste and occupant comfort complaints.
Systems and methods that allow climate control that collaboratively address comfort concerns from building occupants and energy waste concerns are currently not available.
Accordingly, novel and improved methods and systems for collaboratively determining a climate control setting are required.